POLITICS GOVERNANCE STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONS

POLITICS, GOVERNANCE, AND STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONS
Satellite dishes on building roofs in Cairo, Egypt provided new access to information, December 27, 2007.
Photo credit: Paul Keller/Wikimedia.
Perhaps it was inevitable that in this context of
limited political and economic reforms determined
by, and largely benefiting, a narrow slice of the
society, the Arab world would see the emergence
of new forms of bottom-up formal and informal
political mobilization in the form of grassroots
protest movements, new labor unions and wildcat
labor actions, and new political parties, as well as
new mobilization within and recruitment to longstanding
non-state movements like the Muslim
Brotherhood and Salafi groups.
When these forces began to challenge state
authority—both through formal political processes
like elections and through nonviolent civil resistance
like strikes and street protests—governments
quickly found that the decades of declining state
effectiveness meant that their non-coercive tools
for reestablishing control were of limited value. This
problem was compounded by the global recession
of 2008, which raised inflation, raised food prices,
and reduced the rents for non-oil-producing states;
thus, public coffers were light when resources for
co-optation were needed. In addition, the ideology
of Arab nationalism trumpeted by leaders like
Saddam Hussein had lost much of its luster in
the wake of the two Iraq wars, both because of
Hussein’s brutality toward his own people and
because of the intra-Arab sectarian violence that
emerged after 2003. So states increasingly turned
to renewed attempts at coercion and manipulation
of the political system. Increased state coercion
produced the ultimate backlash in the form of mass
popular mobilization against governments across
much of the region. Where the army defected—
as in Egypt and Tunisia—regime change was the
result. But where leaders met popular protest with
violence, they provoked civil conflict and created
openings for violent non-state actors as well.
It is no accident that the parts of the region that are
most disordered today—Libya and Syria—are those
where leaders, having failed to act in a manner that
could have prevented uprisings, sought to repress
popular dissent through the use of force. Instead
of restoring order, these brutal, power-hungry, and
shortsighted men broke their crumbling states to
bits and drove their societies to civil war.
As the state apparatus turned against its own
citizens, those citizens turned elsewhere for
protection—toward sectarian militias and extremist
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